From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 X-Spam-Checker-Version: SpamAssassin 3.4.4 (2020-01-24) on polar.synack.me X-Spam-Level: X-Spam-Status: No, score=-1.9 required=5.0 tests=BAYES_00 autolearn=ham autolearn_force=no version=3.4.4 X-Google-Language: ENGLISH,ASCII-7-bit X-Google-Thread: 101deb,702e716e8c4544e8 X-Google-Attributes: gid101deb,public X-Google-Thread: 103376,53ce549c3b1907c1 X-Google-Attributes: gid103376,public X-Google-ArrivalTime: 2003-03-16 13:00:10 PST Path: archiver1.google.com!news1.google.com!newsfeed.stanford.edu!news-spur1.maxwell.syr.edu!news.maxwell.syr.edu!c03.atl99!cyclone2.usenetserver.com!news.webusenet.com!news01.optonline.net!news4.srv.hcvlny.cv.net.POSTED!not-for-mail From: "John W. Kennedy" User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.3) Gecko/20030312 X-Accept-Language: en-us, en MIME-Version: 1.0 Newsgroups: comp.lang.pl1,comp.lang.ada Subject: Re: Ada Versus PL/I - The debate continues References: <3E73F755.79E9723B@adaworks.com> In-Reply-To: <3E73F755.79E9723B@adaworks.com> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Message-ID: Date: Sun, 16 Mar 2003 21:00:08 GMT NNTP-Posting-Host: 67.82.223.172 X-Trace: news4.srv.hcvlny.cv.net 1047848408 67.82.223.172 (Sun, 16 Mar 2003 16:00:08 EST) NNTP-Posting-Date: Sun, 16 Mar 2003 16:00:08 EST Organization: Optimum Online Xref: archiver1.google.com comp.lang.pl1:4514 comp.lang.ada:35393 Date: 2003-03-16T21:00:08+00:00 List-Id: Richard Riehle wrote: > And your observations indicate that you have very little > knowledge of the current version of Ada. As to built-in > functions, Ada has a powerful collection of these. However, > some of the functions built-in to PL/I are, as part of the Ada language > standard, implemented in standard libraries. There is no > performance penalty and there is a significant portability > benefit. Unfortunately, Robin seems to think that, while PL/I BUILTIN functions are somehow "part of the language", and therefore susceptible to all known forms of inlining and optimization, the Ada library is "only library routines" and therefore subject to all the overhead of pre-compiled, linked, external subroutines. > Ada's support for decimal arithmetic is as good as, and perhaps > a little better than PL/I. This is an important addition to the > current version of Ada which was, admittedly, a drawback in > the first version of Ada. That drawback has been corrected and > in correcting it, the designers learned a lot about what not to do > from other languages (maybe even PL/I). Even before Ada 95, Ada had learned the crucial lesson from PL/I that there is no such thing as a good universal default precision for the result of fixed-point multiplication and division. (PL/I was still an improvement on COBOL, which ignored the question altogether.) > Error recovery in Ada works quite well, thank you. Robin believes that it is a _good_ thing that PL/I allows the run-time ON statement to alter the currently-assigned error recovery, and that PL/I allows return to point of error, and will not be convinced that both of these were excluded from Ada (and every other language I know of with error handling) precisely because experience with PL/I was unfortunate. -- John W. Kennedy "Only an idiot fights a war on two fronts. Only the heir to the throne of the kingdom of idiots would fight a war on twelve fronts" -- "Babylon 5"